And So It Goes
by LividMeerkat
Summary: It started and ended in the exact same place - at the top of the stairs leading down into his basement. The first time, he was expecting her, the last time... even he gets surprised sometimes. Seven moments that define the father-daughter relationship between Gibbs and Ziva. Spans from season 3 to season 16.


**And So It Goes**

It starts and ends in the exact same place - at the top of the stairs leading down into his basement.

The first time he expects her, the second time he saves her, the third and fourth times she wants his blessing, the fifth time it's goodbye, the sixth time she's dead, and the last time… well… even he gets surprised sometimes.

**1\. The Allies**

The first time she sets foot in his basement, she does not want to be there at all. The gun is still hot and heavy and so utterly foreign in her hand as she descends the stairs, her movements slow but composed. He is standing there, looking between her and the body of the man she has just killed, a look of almost confusion on his face and he is saying, "His father is a Deputy Director in Mossad?" So, there's that.

"Yes." She can't take her eyes off the prone body on the ground, half expecting to leap up with a yelled, "Got you," like this is all an elaborately staged practical joke. But Ari was never one for joking around, and she has never been that naïve.

She has, completely without meaning to, followed every order her father gave her to the letter. Ziva can't help but wonder if he had known that it would happen like this. It would not surprise her overly much. He always did beat her at chess.

_"You must think three, four, five steps ahead if you want to succeed in life, otherwise you will end up very much like the King _–_ powerless and trapped and with no allies remaining," he would tell her as she glared furiously at the small black and white pieces, wondering what the point of it all was._

"Not David?"

"Yes. He's my half-brother." Was. Was her half-brother. Back when he was still alive. Before he turned into a carbon copy of their father and spent years manipulating her. Before he disregarded everything their little sister stood for and became the very thing she despised.

He told her that shooting the autopsy worker, Gerald, was to keep his cover. A necessary evil. The cost of doing business.

He told her he didn't kill Caitlin Todd.

He told her he cared about her.

He told her that she wouldn't lose him too.

She had believed him.

_Chara._

She starts in surprise as the silver-haired man gently touches her hand, his expression genuinely apologetic and his fingertips calloused thanks to what she guesses amounts to a generous amount of woodworking. She ducks her head, the beginnings of an old mourning song already bubbling in her throat as he leaves her standing there. He has a funeral of his own to go to. He does not have time to be comforting her over the death of someone who had killed one of his people, someone he had wanted dead more than anything. But actions speak far, far louder than words ever could, it seems that is something they can agree on, because that small brush of his hand against hers tells her everything she needs to know.

A small moment of solidarity between two unlikely allies, now forever bound by their shared pain. She may have been the one to compile the dossiers, digging into every facet of his being, every crook and nanny of his personal life, but it is only now that she thinks she truly understands him.

She thinks she likes what she sees. She thinks he is someone worth trusting; she wishes she could say the same thing about herself.

And so it goes…

**2\. The Saviour**

The second time she visits him, he isn't there. She is pacing, a tightly wound ball of pent up energy and nervousness while he is, for the first time in his life, relaxing on a beach down in Mexico. He owes her and she had been determined not to collect; collecting meant that she had screwed up in some way, it did not matter that it came with the added bonus of seeing him again, Ziva David was always far too proud to be so vulnerable. But she misses him and she _has_ screwed up and he's the obvious choice, the only choice at all, come to think of it.

When he answers he sounds much better than he had the last time she saw him - his words then had been croaky, confused, and terrified, he'd called them all by the wrong names and misremembered details the normal Gibbs would never forget. He had reminded her a little too much of an Alzheimer's patient - too unsure of his surroundings, too unaware of how he'd ended up there, too _rabbit caught in lights _\- wide eyed and cornered; maybe this self-imposed exile of his will turn out to be a good thing, provided he eventually comes back, of course.

A year ago she had stood on this exact same spot, praying over her brother's dead body. Now here she is begging this man, the man who had convinced her that her brother was as corrupt as her father, to come and save her. She cannot believe she uses those words. _'Save me.'_ Even six months ago the whole scenario would have felt like the by-product of somebody's fever dream. Ziva David asking someone for help, asking someone to _save her_… unthinkable.

But here she is, asking, begging him to help her get out of this _little bit of trouble_ and her heart begins to sink in her chest as he says that he's retired, 3000 miles away.

"What do you think I can do that they can't do?" He adds and she forces herself to ignore how frustrated he sounds.

"Honestly, I don't know," she admits and then tags on the fateful words that change everything, "I was hoping maybe… save me?" It is worded like a question, a desperate, last resort sort of question. Maybe she sounds just desperate enough, maybe he is merely keeping his promise, maybe he misses them too. Whatever it is, he agrees and her body goes weak with relief. She barely manages to hang up the phone before she's down on her knees, feet from where her brother's body had lain, whispering a broken prayer of thanks and trying not to sob.

When he finally arrives, straight off a red eye flight, he greets her gruffly, but not unkindly, as she barely restrains herself from flinging her arms around him. His hair is longer, more unkempt, and he's grown a moustache that the old Gibbs would've scoffed at, a moustache even more ridiculous than the dark smudge Abby's old lab assistant, the one who framed Tony for murder, had sported, but it's him.

"Remind me to leave someone else in charge next time," are his first words to her and she lets out a laugh that is only slightly tinged with hysteria.

He came back and all it took was a slightly teary phone call from the woman who had managed to head-slap his amnesia away. Life is strange like that sometimes, she supposes.

The day he shaves off his moustache is the day she allows herself to finally accept that he is back for good. That moustache was a bad omen, she reasons, it was a symbol of Mexico and the months he had spent away from them. The moustache is gone now and he is back.

Her smile isn't quite as beaming as McGee's over-bleached monstrosity had been but it is close.

And so it goes…

**3\. The Blessing**

The third visit is the most awkward one, an achievement indeed considering her very first time there, she had killed her brother.

She is closed off and in pain; he is closed off and questioning everything. The closed off part is not unusual for either of them but the pain and the doubt… that is a new development. He had left her behind knowing she was vulnerable, hurting, and likely to do something downright stupid; she had lied to him and kick started four years of _trust_ and _care_ and _family_ that suddenly seems false.

She enters his house half an hour after she told him she would be there; she had made the choice to join in with the morning drills at the navy lodge she is staying at, an attempt at getting back to full fitness. She makes sure to explain this to him, she does not want him thinking she is not taking this seriously. He cuts her off by asking if she is okay and she begins to ask herself if this is about something more than Somalian terrorists and hot Israeli tarmac and _I am not sure we can work together _because his walls are up around her for the first time in as long as she can remember.

"I am fine, Gibbs," she assures him, and she is, there is no reason for her not to be. She is alive and therefore she is fine, that's the way it is. He doesn't look impressed or convinced and, in a further body blow, nor does he look like he particularly _cares_. His stare is impassive, it's the same one she's seen him level at murderers and rapists and kidnappers… at suspects. He sees her as a _suspect?_

Even though part of her brain is shouting at her to abort the mission, she produces the chisel she had bought him, a gift, she tells him, for leaving her Israel, her efforts are rewarded with a small smile as he inspects the tool. They are standing mere feet apart, but she knows he is further away from her than he has ever been before. She tries to make a joke about it being rigged to explode but it comes out all wrong, as if it were actually a possibility. For some reason, his words when he tells her that he thinks it's a nice chisel, do little to comfort her.

Once again, it is up to her to carry on the flow of stilted conversation and her heart is simultaneously in her throat and on her sleeve as she tells him the words that have been rattling around in her brain ever since the plane journey home, because she knows now that everything that happened had to happen the way it did. For better or worse, she knows her place in the world.

"When you left me in Israel, I… I felt betrayed," she begins, easing into it. These words should not come as a shock to him. "But I… I had a long time to think about things. Very, very, very long time. And you were right to leave me there."

His face does not so much as twitch as he tells her that he knows. Of course he knows, he's Gibbs. She hurries to explain that she's on the same book now, that she is over the hurt and the betrayal and that she had made the simple error of forgetting who she could trust.

"We were a team, and I would like that again," she finishes and as she takes a small step forward, he takes a small step back, telling her that she should talk to the director about her request. It feels like a _no_, a _that can never happen again_.

"It is your blessing I came for," she replies.

He doesn't say anything. Instead he answers his phone and she won't lie, it hurts to hear him talk to Tony about the location of a crime scene without including her. As he hangs up, she remains hopeful that the next words out of his mouth will be instructions to grab her gear.

They aren't. Of course, they aren't. Because she is no longer one of them, maybe she never was.

"You need to talk to Leon Vance. I already told him to expect you," he says instead. His gaze is cold and unfeeling and she wonders whether she had imagined everything, if she had only seen what she had wanted to see the whole time she had worked with him. "And he's not the only one you need to talk to," Gibbs finishes, walking out and leaving her alone in the middle of a painfully empty basement.

It is the reverse of her second visit – then she had been alone and he had come all the way from Mexico to help her, now, three years later, she had asked him for his blessing, a lifeline, and he had left her standing there by herself with words that sounded like a rejection.

And so it goes…

**4\. The Father Figure**

The fourth visit occurs days after the third. They need to talk she says, all business. He isn't surprised she's there, waiting for him, lurking in the shadows; Ziva always was the most likely of all his agents to confront him, to challenge him. It was part of why he liked her.

"Sit down," he tells her, indicating a wooden stool he made years ago. She does as she's told _(which **does** surprise him)_ and starts talking, hesitantly at first but then with more confidence. According to her she understands what he did and why he did it, leaving her in Israel. And while she may well understand that, he doubts she understands what he's feeling now and why he feels that way.

He cuts her off with the simple statement of, "Your brother Ari."

She tilts her chin defiantly and tells him that he knows what happened, tellingly though, she still can't quite meet his eyes.

"I wanna hear it from you. You had orders to kill your brother to earn my trust?"

He doesn't need the confirmation but he gets it anyway, and when he does, he won't lie, it feels like a hammer blow to the chest. He tells her it's a problem; she counters that he doesn't understand.

"You're damn right I don't understand!" He bursts because _she does get how big a deal this is, doesn't she? _She starts to talk and he can't sit there and listen to her attempts at justifying her actions. "You killed your own brother, Ziva!"

"It was because I hoped my father was wrong about Ari, and I did not want someone else blindly following orders. I volunteered to protect him, Gibbs."

Some part of him knows that what she's saying is the truth, the Ziva who had cried into his shoulder in that hospital room didn't obediently execute her brother because she was ordered to, but the part of his brain in control of his speech still feels far too deceived to concentrate on anything else.

"You lied to me," he states.

"No, when I told you Ari was innocent, I believed it. But, yes, I would've lied to you. He was my brother, and you were nothing." At least she's being honest for once and when she starts tearing up as she goes on to ask, "How could you even think…?" he half wants to pull her into a rough hug. "He was my brother and now he is gone. Eli is all but dead to me. And the closest thing I have to a father is accusing me." She trips slightly over the word _father _and he can't argue with that, no matter how much his mind is screaming at him that there's still things she's holding back.

"Okay," he says, and while he doesn't hug her, he does allow his hand to brush hers, much like it had on her first visit.

Weeks later he whispers words into her ear that has her chin trembling and tears pooling in her eyes, a tiny, relieved smile on her face before the floodgates open. He knows she hears the hidden meaning beneath the obvious one: _you're home now, all is forgiven, I'm sorry_.

And so it goes…

**5\. The Phone Call**

The fifth time she drops in on him, she does so from halfway around the world, through a phone line with a bad connection and a heavy heart. He knows what's happening the minute he hears her exhaled, "I am sorry, Gibbs". There's no pre-amble _(there never was with her)_. She tells him she's staying behind in Israel, that this is it for her, and he knows deep within his gut that he's probably never going to see her again. He doesn't try to talk her out of it _(years later he will wake up in the middle of the night wondering why he didn't try harder to bring her back to them, back home)_, he tells her to be careful, to always keep on the lookout. She returns a slightly bitter laugh and a comment about how she has spent her whole life doing just that, she's not going to forget now.

"Tell them..." he hears her breath hitching, "tell them something, yes?"

"I will, they'll understand." They'll understand but they won't like it. Abby'll cry, Tim'll be too shocked to speak, and DiNozzo… God, DiNozzo's gonna be a mess. "You don't haveta do this, you know?"

"Don't. Tony already tried." The implication that if Tony couldn't talk her out of it, no one could, rings loud in Gibbs's ears. How different would things be if he'd just burned that goddamned rule twelve? How different would things be if he hadn't pushed them to be the best at every opportunity? How different would things be if he hadn't tried to turn her into him?

"In that case, don't be a stranger. Come home anytime you want."

"I am not sure DC was ever truly my home," she says softly. He doesn't take her words to heart; she's hurt and lost and unsure of where she fits in, it only makes sense she would try to convince herself that distancing herself completely was for the best. After all, she'd done it before. Look how that turned out.

"We'll miss you, Ziver."

"And I will miss you too, all of you, but this is something that needs to be done. I am not the same person I used to be and… I think it is too much for me, for the person I am now…"

"Don't need to explain yourself to me, Ziva."

"I know, but I feel like I should anyway. Goodbye, Gibbs."

He remembers an offhand comment she made once about how she doesn't like to say 'goodbye', it all feels too final, apparently. That she would only say goodbye if she was sure that it really _was _goodbye. It could be a Hebrew thing, could be a Ziva thing, could be a mixture of the two. Whatever it is both of them know what this is, he's under no illusions. This is it, once and for all. Eight years all boil down to a one-minute long phone call from several different time zones away.

"Goodbye, Ziva," he has to force the two words out and if he sounds like he's on the verge of tears too he doesn't think he can be blamed. Eight years… the same amount of time Kelly had been in his life. He never got to see Kelly grow up, he never got to see Ziva be young and carefree but put the two of them together and he pretty much experienced the whole range of fatherhood. Kelly from her birth _(six months old, he'd been deployed when Shannon had actually given birth)_ until she was eight years old; Ziva from early adulthood _(still young and impressionable but appearing much older and mature than her twenty-three years of life would suggest)_ until now, her attempt at finally fleeing the nest.

Gibbs still can't quite bring himself to hang up and apparently neither can Ziva because he can still hear her slightly too fast, slightly too broken breaths.

"Shalom, aba."

Shalom: hello, goodbye, and peace all at once. Fitting last words.

"Shalom, kid."

He hears a few more stuttering sobs and then she hangs up and he's left with a glass of bourbon, a bunch of hand tools, and bad news. He flips the phone shut and throws it against the wall. He doesn't care when it splinters and shatters as he takes a gulp of booze straight from the bottle, the fiery liquid burning a path right down to his stomach and he knows when he wakes up in the morning he'll remember very little of the night.

Turns out he's just as good at breaking things as he is at building them.

And so it goes…

**6\. The Ghost**

The sixth time she's there, she isn't even there at all. In spirit maybe, but not in person. Gibbs, DiNozzo, and a ghost makes three. A ghost with a very living daughter. The girl, Tali, is the spitting image of her mother, except for her eyes. Those eyes came from DiNozzo all day long. There's absolutely no doubting just who the girl's parents are. Ziva and DiNozzo, he always figured they'd break rule twelve eventually, he just never suspected it would end up like this.

He knows now, before DiNozzo's even opened his mouth, as clear as he did almost three years ago, that this is him saying goodbye to an agent he's allowed himself to care about far too much. An agent set on leaving America to try and pursue something unobtainable… Where has he heard that one before?

Sometimes he hates it when he's right. Because he'd known that she wasn't in the right frame of mind, that they'd never hear from her again. Admittedly, he never thought she'd wind up dead within the next few years, that one's really packing a punch, a real blow to the solar plexus with the sort of force behind it that only Ziva could muster.

They never talked about her after she left, some days he wishes they had – no matter what anyone said or did, she was more than just an agent to all of them. It says a lot about the type of person she had been that even despite their silence her presence had been felt; strong and quiet, much like Ziva herself. He'd tried to ignore it, call him a bastard _(and people frequently do)_ but he couldn't afford to let himself miss her because once he got started there's no way he'd be able to stop.

And now he's got DiNozzo, steely eyed and determined but also fucking terrified and clinging to hope, standing there, talking about the almost two-year-old daughter he didn't even know he had.

"I've never been anybody's everything before," he's saying and a part of Gibbs, the part he really hates sometimes, wants to lash out at Ziva. Wants to grab her by the shoulders and shake her and ask her why she couldn't tell them, at least tell DiNozzo. The Ziva that talked about _family_ and _permanence_ and all that _bullshit_ wouldn't have kept this a secret, that Ziva would've wanted her daughter to know her father, to get the chance that she didn't. But Ziva's gone and she's left a broken family behind. _Another_ broken family, he amends, and he wonders what it'll take for at least one of them to catch a break because Ziva herself sure as hell hadn't; as far as he could tell up her life both before and after joining NCIS hadn't exactly been a happy one, it was all just one _fucking trauma_ after another.

"I'm done now," DiNozzo continues, "I'm gonna take Tali to Israel, look for some answers. Then I'm going to take her to Paris. Ziva loves Paris."

The present tense doesn't escape Gibbs and he realises that he'll probably wind up doing the exact same thing. Because he doesn't believe she's dead either. _Can't _believe she's dead. Because if she's dead then he's officially, on the record, failed yet another daughter. She was always too alive to be so dead. Ziva taken out by a mortar attack… the woman who survived Somalia and the loss of her entire family, including the death of her brother by her own hand, and who knows what horrors before Gibbs met her wouldn't allow herself to die in such a way. And leaving her young daughter sleeping a corridor away? That doesn't sound like Ziva.

"You gotta do what you gotta do; and you gotta believe what you gotta believe."

"I'd say 'thank you', but that doesn't quite cover it, boss."

"You take care of yourself and your family, DiNozzo." One last order. One last assignment. Gibbs hopes Tony does a far better job of it than he himself did. If something happens to that little girl, the only thing left of Ziva, then that's the day Gibbs finally gives up.

"Copy that, boss."

And so it goes…

**7\. The Return**

The seventh time she has no time for pleasantries, and she tells so, though maybe she just doesn't want to give him an opening to question exactly how she's here. He would think she was another ghost, another Diane or Mike or Kate or Jenny, except the noise of her boots thumping against the wood as she jogs down the stairs is audible, the ghosts in his mind never made a sound. She looks different too. Diane, who had talked about _letting people in_ and of _feelings_ and _walls_ and who was as dead as they got, had been dressed exactly as she had been when she was shot. Ziva's older, lighter, and with the same spilling dark curls that had been phased out during her time in America. Her Star of David, the one that had been passed from mother to daughter by way of DiNozzo, has been replaced with a small green gem that he feels he should probably know the significance of. There's no way his old mind would be able to come up with _that_ on its own.

And anyway, Ziva's the one ghost he's never seen before. He's not sure why. He'd say it was because he knew she wasn't dead except that would, at least partially, be bullshit. It was, after all, a running theme within his life, all the women who really meant something to him dying under suspicious, unnatural circumstances. Shannon, Kelly, Kate, Diane, Jenny, Ellen. Ziva had already come back from the dead once, chances were she wasn't going to manage to pull off the same trick twice.

"Well," she cocks her head and looks up at him with brown eyes dancing with happiness and worry and _life_, "aren't you gonna say something?"

His first instinct is almost to blurt out, _'since when did you use contractions like that?_' as if that was the takeaway here. He opens and closes his mouth several times, really not sure what he _can _say.

_"I thought you were dead."_

_"Where you been_ _?"_

_"Are you okay?"_

_"What the hell are you doing here?"_

_"Why didn't you let DiNozzo know you were pregnant with his kid?"_

_"You know you kinda fucked up, right?"_

_"Are you real?"_

_"I missed you."_

Eventually he settles on the only thing that feels right. The only thing that encompasses everything he's feeling right now. The only thing that'll let her know that he still cares about her as much as he did the day she left, no matter how shit he is at showing it.

"_Ziver…_"

And when her eyes spark and that oh-so familiar smile blossoms across her face, he knows as well as she does that she's home.

And so it goes.


End file.
